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Google opens up new front in browser wars with Chrome

Google has announced plans to release an innovative new open source web …

Google has revealed plans today to release an innovative new open source web browser called Chrome that includes some extraordinary and unprecedented features. Google says that its new browser will move the web forward and provide a stronger platform for emerging web standards.

"We realized that the web had evolved from mainly simple text pages to rich, interactive applications and that we needed to completely rethink the browser," said Google VP of product management Sundar Pichai in a blog entry. "What we really needed was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for web pages and applications, and that's what we set out to build."

The browser is built on top of Apple's WebKit HTML rendering engine, a lightweight renderer that is known for its clean code base, good performance, and excellent standards-compliance. WebKit's versatility and the ease with which it can be embedded in applications has led to its adoption in numerous contexts, including Google's Android web browser. Alongside WebKit, Google will be using its own JavaScript virtual machine called V8, which was designed for high performance and has some compelling features.

One of the most impressive technical innovations that Google has brought to Chrome is a multiprocess design. Each individual browser tab runs within its own isolated process, much like the way that processes work in an operating system. This will massively increase the robustness of the browser by insulating the application from bugs that cause crashes within individual tabs. The tab will go down, but the rest of the browser will remain unaffected. The multiprocess design also reduces the impact of memory fragmentation by ensuring that the memory used by a tab can be reclaimed completely when the tab is closed.

Another unique advantage of the multiprocess design is that it will allow users to see the distribution of memory between the various tabs and plug-ins used by the browser. Users will be able to use Chrome's built-in process manager to see how much memory is being used by each individual tab so that they can properly identify the real culprit when the browser begins to hog resources. Google has a few other strategies for reducing memory consumption too, like extremely aggressive and heavily-optimized garbage collection.

Security is also clearly an area where Google plans to push forward web innovation. Chrome has a sophisticated sandboxing system that is designed to protect against malware by restricting access to the underlying system functionality. Google will also be leveraging its malware blacklists (the same ones it uses to protect users from clicking through harmful search results) to warn users when they attempt to visit a site that is known to be infected.

There are many other nice features in Chrome too, including a rich autocompletion, tightly integrated Google Gears, a site-specific browser framework like Prism, and a private browsing function called Incognito that resembles Microsoft's recently announced InPrivate functionality.

Google says that an early test version for Windows will be released tomorrow, and support for Linux and Mac OS X will arrive in future releases. Many details have already been disclosed by Google Blogoscoped, which received early access to the promotional material, including an impressive 38-page comic spread by cartoonist Scott McCloud.

You can look forward to reading about our hands-on impressions of Google Chrome following its release.